Keywords

Comments

Modify its Code of Ethics and the rules of the Ethics Commission so that members of the General Assembly are required to recuse themselves from debate and votes regarding issues in which they have any self-interest.

The onslaught of bills (proposed legislation) from Committees and special consideration (last minute introductions) should be re-visited with more focus on a remediation of 'rules' to avoid the confusion, financial slip over (notwithstanding such fiscal notes), assurance to full-funded manatees on local and state levels, streamlining agency procedures and strict open meeting/records processes.

There may be an opportunity to institute a review of legislative enactments over a period of time ( segments by chronology and/or subject matter) that clash with other laws, are outdated, need updating , which could open up the entire legislative process to more comprehensive budget and policy evaluation with additional improvements for efficiency, performance methods and effective operations of state (and local) government.

The General Asembly to consider creating a subcommittee to implement a strategy and to allocate funds to hire an Economic Director to market RI and attract diversified businesses by actually approaching small and medium size companies(in business 3-5 years or more)to relocate here. Another approach is to hire several 2-3 part-time regional economic directors who have acquired experience in economcic development in other states. Refer to the ProJo Sunday, June 24th article about the need for a PR person and an Economc Director to represent the state, by working on the phone or email and collect pertiment information to be inputed in a database. The economic director needs to consider the type of businesses to approach that may compliment the existing businesses in RI or be from a different economic sector that may be appropriate for the East Bay, West Bay, South County and northern RI. The goal is to provide current data on the RI tax structure applied to businesses, tax benefits, available commercial space and available land to provide some business reasons to relocate to Rhode Island including the educational and cultural assets. Other states allocated funds to accomplsih this goal and have been successful,like the State of Michigan(refer to Projo's June 24th article).

If they don't empower the cities and towns to have more local authority over budgets, we should not be surprised when a number of RI's large cities fall into banktuptcy. There is not much time straighten this out.

Most likely, any real progess will call for a better balance between the numbers of democrats and republicans in the assembly. We virtually have a one-party system in this state and it's time for a change.

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